Looking across the landscape of contemporary culture

Young people in England are drinking less not more than they used to

This is very interesting. It’s easy to complain about moral standards collapsing and young people becoming more reckless and hedonistic. But is it true? Not according to Department of Health statistics.

Take this one factoid: “the proportion of 11- to 15-year-olds who drank alcohol in the week before they were polled fell from 26% in 2001 to 12% in 2011”. Early teens, in other words, are drinking far less than they did ten years ago.

Young Britons, widely portrayed as binge-drinking hedonists, are turning into the new puritans, according to official figures and reports from student bars across the country.

Statistics showing a continuing decline in alcohol intake, especially among students, suggest they are increasingly rejecting the drinking and drug-taking culture of their parents’ generation and reversing the excesses of the late 1990s, said Professor Fiona Measham, a criminologist at Durham University, who has been studying drinking patterns for more than two decades.

Measham attacked health professionals for being unwilling to recognise the shifting patterns of behaviour, and for persisting with “shock tactics” designed to scare young people.

Department of Health statistics show a fall since 2001 in the numbers of under-16s in England who are drinking. The latest DoH report, Smoking, Drinking and Drug Use Among Young People in England, reveals that the proportion of 11- to 15-year-olds who drank alcohol in the week before they were polled fell from 26% in 2001 to 12% in 2011.

There has been a drop in the proportion of this age group who think drinking is acceptable for someone of their age. In 2010, 55% had never tasted alcohol (39% in 2001), while 32% thought it was acceptable for someone of their age to drink once a week, compared with 46% in 2003. Similarly, 11% of pupils thought that it was OK for someone of their age to get drunk once a week, compared with 20% who thought that in 2003.

Levels of binge-drinking among young people have also fallen sharply. In 2010, only 17% of 16-24-year-old women drank more than six units on their heaviest day of drinking, compared with 27% in 2005, and 24% of young men drank more than eight units, compared with 32% in 2005.

Measham puts this in plain language, without the raw statistics:

The trends are clear. From about 2002 onwards, the tide turned. I’ve seen it in my students and I’ve seen it when I do my research in pubs and clubs. Something is changing, a cultural shift, there is no longer the desire to go out and get completely obliterated. It’s true of drugs also – use peaked in 2002 and there has been a slow decline.

Each generation wants to be different from the one before. The 1990s saw the cafe bars and an end to pubs being male-dominated. The drinks industry targeted women who were caught up in the glamour of Sex and the City-style cosmopolitan drinking, and of ‘me time’ and drinking with the girls and there was a complete revolution in consumption patterns. But for this generation that’s all a bit passé and they are more responsible. Increasingly, it’s the older generation setting a bad example and teenagers are quite disparaging of that.

One of the trends I’m seeing is students spending more on one occasion, rather than going out all the time. When I’m out doing research in clubs, young people will be paying large amounts to get in, but you don’t see huge queues at the bar. Another factor is that the worst excesses of the drinks industry have been curtailed by legislation – the free drinks and happy hours and irresponsible promotion of drinking.

It’s partly to do with ID schemes, debt, and unemployment. But it’s also simply that students have discovered more interesting things to do than drink themselves silly. At Leeds University, Antony Haddley, union affairs officer, said:

Interestingly, although night-time drinking may be less popular, we have seen a significant interest in membership to our clubs and societies, so students participating in a massive range of activities with their friends from skydiving to equestrianism and everything in between. So students are not suddenly turning into recluses who don’t go out; they are still having a good time, without alcohol.

4 Responses

When I was a teenager my parents drank a bottle of wine every night with dinner. When I started working at BT in the late 80s it was the done thing for everyone to go to the pub on a Friday lunchtime and we often didn’t get back to the office. The canteen even had a bar! People who didn’t drink were treated with suspicion. This changed around the mid 90s probably with the drink driving campaigns and job cuts. These days a typical workplace ’round of drinks’ includes lattes and mochas rather than beer and wine.

I think the change in parent drinking habits has had a knock on effect on children. If you don’t see your parents drinking every day and going to the pub every Saturday night you don’t do it yourself.

This is all very interesting and, dare I say, encouraging – for the Student population who seem to have been the core group of this study. My concern remains with those who are not included in this study. What about those for whom ‘the future’ holds little or no promise and who continue to seek escape from the products of the off-licence or the local dealer? What also of the generation(s) only a few years older than our present under graduates who continue to drink themselves into oblivion?
It is excellent news for the up and coming generation who, I hope, take a cue from the reported trends but there is still an awful long way to go with those whom society seems to forget until they end up in Court, Prison or wherever.
I’m sorry if this seems very negative Father Stephen, but I see far too much of what I have just mentioned to be as optimistic as the Measham study suggests I could or should be.

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Looking across the landscape of contemporary culture - at the arts, science, religion, politics, philosophy; sorting through the jumble; seeing what stands out, what unsettles, what intrigues, what connects, what sheds light. Father Stephen Wang is a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Westminster, London. He is currently Senior University Chaplain, based at Newman House Catholic Chaplaincy. [Banner photo with kind permission of Matthew Powell]

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